Saturday, March 26, 2011

As a Georgia football player, Mike Gilliard gets approached by a lot of strangers around Athens. There was one in particular he remembered, who he thinks approached him at the mall one day.

“He asked if we were Georgia football players, and that was it, nothing major,” said Gilliard, an inside linebacker who will be a junior this fall.

It was only this week that Gilliard made the connection: That man was Jamie Hood, the accused police killer who finally turned himself in Friday night after a three-day search.

Hood, 33, is accused of killing Athens-Clarke County police offer Elmer “Buddy” Christian on Tuesday, and also wounding another officer.

Gilliard remembered encountering Hood a few more times, but said he didn’t know him very well.

“Me and Washaun (Ealey) talked about it that the other day: We’ve seen him plenty of times out before,” Gilliard said. “Matter of fact, out, he’s never been a threat or anything. He says ‘what’s up’ to us, and basically that’s it.”

Gilliard and several teammates were watching like many others on Friday night as Hood turned himself in to police on live television.

That wasn’t the only Georgia football connection to the Hood man-hunt.

Former Georgia player Bryant Gantt reached out to Hood via Facebook and was instrumental in negotiating Hood’s surrender, according to WSB-TV. Gantt, who lettered at Georgia from 1989-90, told the station he knew Hood in passing.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made. Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."